If tfl scrapped the trains, they would run on very healthy profits on the buses alone, i was told this personally at their head office in Victoria St.
I agree on the Boris bus, i was being a little playful about the job creation. It's a vanity project, people say boris bikes were also a vanity project but i personally think it's a good think for the city log term, long overdue too.

Seeing as you worked on that project as you said you may be in a position to help answer a question.
To keep the emissions down they use adblue but also even though the emissions are down is it right that by doing this you decrease the full efficiency of the bus?

Adblu, in conjunction with a particulate trap was only introduced relatively recently in order to reduce NOx (oxides of nitrogen), I was primarily involved in reducing PM (particulate matter) and HC (hydrocarbons). From my experience of particulate traps, the effect of fuel consumption was negligible. There was a far greater variable ina driver's right boot than could ever be evidenced from a trap. The only time a trap would cause a problem with fuel economy is if the the duty cycle (or stupid maintenance*) caused the trap to clog up and increase exhaust back-pressure. We had very few examples of this simply because we used to coduct extensive datalogging of the duty cycles on each route and model of bus operating on that route. If we presented a case to TfL that the route was not suitable for particulate traps, then they would allow the bus to operate on catalyst only.

* one example of poor maintenance that I encountered was an excessive rate of sooting up on buses in one particular garage, after a trap post-mortem, we also found high levels of mineral oil in the soot. The most obvious cause of excess sooting and oil contamination would be worn rings or valve guides but there was no evidence of blue smole from the bus exhausts. I was waiting at the garage one evening to commence fitting more logging equipment and was parked opposite the fuelling island. The yard monkey drove the bus to the island and as the tank was filling he also put a litre of oil in the engine. He never bothered dipping the sump, just put the oil in regardless. I wandered over to him and asked if it was normal practice and he confirmed that it was HIS normal practice. Once he drove the bus into the garage so I could fit the logger, I took the opportunity to check the dipstick. The oil was about 4" above the FULL level. Result was: I had a word with the fleet engineer, he bollocked the fuel island chimp, they changed the practice, the sooting problem disappeared and they saved £1000s in lubricating oil

You criticised big business as you do all the time - how your suggest there are shades of grey - defies belief when you read your stuff. My point about the unions was simply to suggesting another interest group that has influence - a group that you deem beyond criticism. This was obviously lost on you.

The point about regulation was also lost on you - the health service should be pretty stringently regulated, the fact they have paid out million in compromise agreements to cover up their short comings was again an illustration of a similar but different situation involving another of your sacred cows - again woos.

If you want to create growth through employment I would suggest it could be a good idea to get large business on side and consult with them - let's face it they do know a thing or two about wealth and job creation - Morrisons employs 160k staff and turns over 18bn and made of profit of 850m - to run a business of this size takes quite a lot of skill and know how.

I never damned my original point - your point was big business would not be the same without the public money spent with it - my point was without business you might not have public services. Take Salts Mill - without the mill and the profits it generated there would have been no village, hospital, school etc.

Now compare Titus Salt or Joseph Rowntree or James Reckitt or the Cadbury Brothers to any of the faceless, nameless funds that are running large businesses these days.

All of the former invested in their employees' welfare. They may have been accused of exploitation but they made sure their workforce had comfortable homes (at affordable rents), canteens supplying good food at subsidised prices and leisure & health facilities to ensure their workforce were at peak productivity.

Now the faceless corporations attempt to achieve the same result through fear and intimidation.

That's what you get when you go for a secular rather than a Christian society.

No that's what you get when you go for largely unrestrained capitalism driven solely by profit through companies who feel no allegiance or responsibility to either the society they operate in or their own workforce.

Titus Salt was far from secular in his beliefs, building a congregational church opposite his mill and donating land for a weslyan church.

He was a remarkable man though and a wander through his village is a very pleasant way to spend a sunday afternoon, but you can also say the same about many other Victorian philanthropists who saw the value in treating their workforce humanely rather than as items on a balance sheet.

I rather think that was Dally's point mate

Pity John Lewis doesn't tie in with that analysis.

Ha! Well thats what I get for contradicting everything he says without reading it first.

Rubbish.
You don't have to be a Christian to have a conscience and a secular society does not prohibit an individual's adherence to a faith.

You really do knee-jerk some bollox Dally.

Meanwhile, back in the real world inter-personal relationships, business ethics, etc, etc have all mardedly improved with the decline in religious observance haven't they. That's at a stage when most people in influence still grew up with a degree of religion in their childhood. That won't be the case in a few years time.

The ethics of (some) big businesses have got worse in part because, with so many of said big businesses now having no real home base and no concomitant sense of loyalty to any place, they have no sense of ethical obligation to anything other than the company bank account/shareholders/owners. And with both their increased size and deregulation, they can better get away with such behaviour.

Your point about religion is irrelevant.

If religion ensured good behaviour, we'd have had thousands of years of peace and no crime.

I just think his trolling is getting more obvious/desperate.

And a level of wealth that would make many of today's rich look poor. Society was very different then and whilst he had a superb way of treating his staff how much of what he did was from a selfish point of view i.e. the need to keep the factory staffed and functional?

Hw was also in a very competitive market for staff - the industrial revolution especially in Bradford expanded at an incredible rate - if you wanted the right staff you had to present a compelling argument for them to work for you.

What is interesting is how quickly the fortune evaporated.

There's nothing wrong with a spot of enlightened self interest.

Between that and a spot of common sense, it's difficult to understand why some employers don't realise that treating employees well is actually good for recruitment, retention, sickness rates, productivity ...

Rubbish again.
In the days of such things as the slave trade, child labour and hanging kids for stealing petty items "[imost people in influence still grew up with a degree of religion in their childhood[/i".

The good examples we can point at such as Cadbury, Rowntreee and the like were largely Quakers or non-conformists and ostracised by mainstream Christians.

THINK before you post, Dally.

Linking this to something else that's arisen, it's actually quite intriguing to compare Britain with Germany during a period in which the latter is asserted, by certain types of historians, to have been dreadfully militaristic and simply paving the way for old Adolf.

This is usually claimed to have started under Old Fritz, yet comparisons of rates of execution, for instance, show that non-militaristic (

) Britain executed vastly more of its people than did Frederich's Prussia. And like his friend Voltaire, Frederich was hardly convinced of there being any sort of deity.



Oh now you're really pushing it.

Sigh ... yeah, you're right.
The symptoms suggest an opinion born of another opinion born of a previous opinion, all baseless but arranged in a convenient circle such that each "proves" the previous one.

I don't automatically subscribe to the generous benefactor theory either in his case or Benjamin Gott and other examples, they lived in remarkable times, were wealthy beyond imagination and lucky enough to have investors throwing moeny at them and inventors banging on their doors with ways to make their factories even more efficient, incredible to imagine.

There is an small exhibition inside Salts Mill about the man and his family which promotes the generous benefactor opinion but truthfully he rented those houses to his own employees, he was very strict about the upkeep of those houses so that they didn't devalue into slums, and obviously benefitted from then having a very loyal and hardworking workforce - on the other hand his village wouldn't have housed everyone who worked there so presumably the houses went to favoured staff or management and the rest had to travel in from nearby slums ?


Its a good afternoon out (I'm sure you've done it) but the most remarkable thing is how the hell the businesses who trade from there now manage to sell anything at those prices and how the hell David Hockney ever sold anything too

I agree.

Regards
Enron & Lehmann Brothers

Valid point, that.
As was mentioned in the "Revolution" thread, establishment figures were very wary of possible revolution and working-class uprising.
It's perfectly possible that the likes of Ackroyd (Ackroyden and Copley Model Village) and Salt (Saltaire) saw the advantage in keeping the workforce placid. But it's also possible that they had a paternalistic view towards their workforce, so my guess is that it was probably a mixture of what they felt was right and what was expedient.

In some other cases though, such as the Crossleys in Halifax (where Mrs Crossley, in particular, always remembered where they had come from and how Christian it was to help others ... and was known to berate her husband and sons if they dared to forget) and the Fieldens in Todmorden who campaigned for a shorter working week for children and compulsory education for those children rather than have them working full-time in the mills.
Of course, Fielden could only go so far or the less altruistic employers would have out-competed him on cost and he'd have been out of business with his workers then unemployed, homeless and starving.
It required an act of parliament to keep that playing field level.

Today, we need to remember that businesses cannot afford to be be moral because business and the market are, in essence, amoral because they can't afford to be anything else ... the baseline of fair play to employees and customers always needs to be set by government to ensure that level playing field.
The market has no conscience.

And entirely valid point.

And of course, globalisation has made this situation worse, allowing companies to simply flit to a country where a lower cost of living means they can pay less.

On the other hand, the likes of KPMG have become Living Wage employers because they realise that such moves eventually save money by improving recruitment, retention, sick rates and productivity. It shouldn't be rocket science, should it?

All you need do is look at the three principles the Quaker founders of Barclays built their bank on:

Honesty, Integrity, Plain Dealing

Makes you wonder what happened to those principles.